How to Delegate SEO Work&nbspEffectively

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Whether you’re the only SEO at your company, work within a larger team, or even manage others, you still have to stay on top of your projects. Project management skills aren’t and shouldn’t be exclusive to someone (or some tool) with the title “project manager.” I believe that having good project manager skills is essential to getting work done at all, let alone delivering high-quality work in a timely and efficient way.

In defense of management

Freakonomics Radio released this podcast episode in October called In Praise of Maintenance. The TL;DR (or TL;DL, rather) is that our society rewards innovators, but rarely (if ever) celebrates the maintainers: the people who get sh*t done, and do it reliably, often without anyone’s noticing. This podcast episode confirmed what I’d been feeling for a long time: We don’t award enough praise to the good project managers out there who keep engagements moving forward. And that’s largely because it’s not a sexy job: it’s not exciting to report to stakeholders that necessary services that have been reliable for so long are, as always, continuing to be reliable.

It’s only when things aren’t running smoothly does it seem project managers get recognition. A lack of a rewards system means that we’re not teaching PMs, Consultants, Account Managers, and more that their excellent organizational skills are their most valuable asset. Instead, the message being communicated is that innovation is the only praise-worthy result, which oftentimes may not be essential to getting your work done. The irony here is that innovation is the by-product of an excellent project management framework. The situational awareness of knowing how to delegate work to your colleagues and a repertoire of effective organizational habits is vital if you ever want to free up your attention to allow for the headspace and concentration ingenuity requires.

Sound familiar? Lately I’ve been focused on the idea of a cluttered headspace, where it feels like everything on your to-do list is floating ephemerally around in your head, and you can’t seem to pin down what needs to be done. Of course, this isn’t specific to just professional life (or consulting work): it can happen with personal tasks, which can present their own set of organizational challenges. Regardless of your professional role, crunch time is exactly when you need to put on your project manager hat and get yourself organized. Read on to find out the tools and tricks I use to stay on top of my work, and how I delegate work when needed without losing a personal touch on projects.

Manage projects with tools that work for you

What do you do to make that process easier? One Slack conversation that seems to always come up is which project management tools do we use (and which is best). I take the annoying middle-ground stance of “whatever tool you use is best” and I stand by it (don’t worry, I’ll get to the actual list in a minute): a tool is only useful if it’s actually used.

So how do you get started? It’s always important to have preferred methods for project tracking, note keeping, and reminders. Depending on your role and learning style, you may find that some tools work better than others for you. For instance, while I have a few tools I work with to stay on top of client work, I also have a clear plastic desk cover that I can jot down notes and reminders on. Here’s a breakdown of the tools I use to manage projects, and the needs they meet.

Inbox by Gmail. Yes, it’s different from classic Gmail. The two greatest aspects of Inbox, in my opinion, is the ability to snooze emails until a specific day and time, and save reminders for yourself (e.g. “Check in on Ty’s progress for the page speed audit,” or “Watch the video in this link after work”).

Why are these my favorite Inbox features? Both functions serve similar purposes: they tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. The ability to snooze emails and save reminders for yourself is invaluable when we’re talking about headspace: this way, you can use your email as your to-do list for any given day. If you know you don’t have to respond to someone until X date, there’s no reason their previous email should sit in your Inbox taking up space. As a result, I use Inbox as my personal assistant to remind me when I need to jump back to a deliverable or respond to a client. It’s possible to reach Inbox zero on a given day, even if you have an email awaiting your response. Just snooze it and attend to it when you really need to.

Google Drive. Sure, not a sexy or new tool, but it’s my home for everything. Not only does GDrive cover all the file types that I need (Documents, Sheets, and Presentations), it also allows for easy, real-time collaboration on files with your colleagues and clients. If you like to nudge people to do things, too, you can assign contacts work to do from your GDocs (just highlight text, click the comment icon to the right, and insert the @ symbol with their name). If you’re crafting a presentation with a colleague, for instance, you can assign slides with questions for them. I recommend tagging them with your question and including a due date for when you need their answer.

Tools my colleagues love:

Trello. It’s not my personal favorite, but a lot of my teammates love using Trello as their to-do lists, or even for tracking web dev or SEO projects. If you prefer text over visuals, you can also try Basecamp (which I tend to prefer).

Asana. Another great project management tool — I tend to use it on a project basis rather than a to-do list. If you’re a developer, you may prefer JIRA.

Of course, it’s possible to manage and delegate work without these, but I’m of the mind that pen, paper, and email can only get you so far, especially if you want your delegation process to be somewhat automated (think tagging colleagues in comments within documents, or assigning projects to them within standard project management tools like Asana).

How to delegate effectively

Tools can only get you so far: any good delegation process starts with a conversation (no more than five or 10 minutes) about the work you need and a great brief. The conversation establishes whether your colleague actually has the bandwidth to take your work on, and the brief goes into greater detail of what you actually need done. The brief format I follow works for a large number of different deliverables — I’ve used this same layout to delegate page speed, technical and backlink audits, and content briefs to colleagues. Below are the fields I always include, and the type of information always provided:

Subject: [BRIEF] Work I Need Done

Deadline: The precise date and time you need it, with enough time for you to review the work before delivering it to your stakeholders or your client. If it’s something like a page speed audit, I would allow up to a full week to review it and ensure that it’s in the best format and all the information is correct. Of course, it also depends on how familiar the delegate is with projects like these — if they’ve done a number of audits for you in the past, they may know your style and you may not need as much time to edit their final work.

Output/Deliverable: The format in which you need this work delivered to you. Maybe it’s a Google Doc or an Excel Spreadsheet. This brief format can work for any output you need, including more creative pieces (do you need a video edited to :30 seconds in a .mov format? A photo edited to certain specs and saved as a PNG or IDD?).

Expected hours: This may be the most challenging element of the entire brief. How long do you anticipate this work to take, start to finish? Keep in mind the experience level of the person to whom you’re delegating. Is this their first SEO technical audit, or their 30th? You will almost definitely need to check in with your delegate a few times (more on that later), so how long do you anticipate these meetings to take? Just like the deadline timing estimate, use your best judgment based on work you’ve done with this person in the past, and the type of work you’re assigning.

Relevant materials: This is where you can provide additional articles or tools that should help your colleague do the work you’ve assigned to them. Some good examples are 101 articles (like ones on the Moz blog!), or a tool you know you always use in projects like the one you’re delegating (think SEMRush, new photo editing software, or Google’s Keyword Planner).

Check in with your delegate along the way

Once you’ve delivered your brief, the next step is to make sure you check in with your delegate along the way. Even the most experienced person can benefit from added context, so whether it’s an in-person meeting or a five-minute call, touching base shortly after delivering a brief is necessary to ensure you’re on the same page. Beyond kicking off a project, it’s important to have check-ins along the way to stay on track.

At Distilled, we like to follow a check-in model at the following completion points:

1% (kickoff conversation);

5% (validation of process);

30% (ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time into the project);

and 90% (final editing and proofing).

Not only is this good to keep everyone on the right track, it’s even more valuable both to the person delegating and the delegate to know how much work should be completed at which points, and how much detail is required as you give feedback.

In many ways, great project management and delegation skills are really future-proofing skills. They allow you to be on top of your work regardless of what work (or life) throws at you. You can be the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t manage your projects effectively, you’ll either fail or not see the greatest impact you otherwise could achieve. It’s time to ditch praising the model of a lone innovator who somehow “does it all,” and instead truly celebrate the maintainers and managers who ensure things remain operational and steady. Often, our biggest problems aren’t best solved with a complex solution, but rather a clear mind and supportive team.

A large part of turning projects around comes down to improving the project management process, and being organized allows you to juggle multiple clients and acknowledge when you’re at capacity. Without a solid foundation of project management skills, there is no groundwork for successful innovations and client projects. The next time you’re looking to bolster your skill set, do an audit of how you manage your own work, and identify all of the things that prevent you from delivering the best work on time.

About zeehj —

Zee came to Distilled after several web development and digital communications positions in the nonprofit space, including the Ad Council, Power Poetry, VolunteerMatch, DonorsChoose and Planned Parenthood. With her background, Zee learned how to make the most impact with shoestring budgets. A graduate of Smith College, Zee studied French Studies and Psychology and studied psychoanalysis at Paris IV – Denis Diderot University. Aside from analyzing languages and humans, she found a home in the tech space, where solutions are complex and (sometimes) easier to come by. Ask her about: user experience, web development, analytics, technical SEO questions, and rescue dogs like hers.

I really like the check-in model you mentioned, I will definitely be using that:

1% (kickoff conversation);

5% (validation of process);

30% (ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time into the project);

and 90% (final editing and proofing).

My question for you on delegation: What's in it for the colleague who is going to do your work? Most people are busy, or will claim they are, unless there is a reward. I'm curious if you have any ideas on how to work through this. Thanks!

Hey UKBB! I actually tend to delegate more to people who are my level or senior to me. It DEFINITELY is easier to delegate down the pipeline if you have folks junior to you on your team, but it's invaluable to be able to delegate laterally and vertically within your job's hierarchy (and definitely not impossible). When it comes to delegation vertically (above) in particular, I recommend a trading system for work: it requires you to have extra time planned out in your month, but will make it easier to trade off projects.

Zee, some would say that managers who accept upward delegation are ... crap managers, that allowing upward delegation to exist in an organisation is
essentially rewarding poor performers who reduce their workload by intentionally pushing part of it to their managers.

Managers need to build a culture of ownership. Accepting upward delegation isn't the best way to do that.

On the contrary, I'd say that managers who don't trade work with the people they manage are crap managers.

At Distilled we run a system where everyone starts the month with a set amount of capacity and a number of projects that they own. They can then book work to anyone who has capacity, and they're encouraged to spread it around so that everyone gets the broadest possible experience and clients get the broadest possible expertise.

It's essentially an internal market for work, where the role of managers is figuring out what to do when the amount of booked work doesn't equal the total capacity, and making sure the people they manage are getting the support and development they need.

We prevent managers from being overworked by giving them higher hourly rates and including their management responsibilities as part of their booked work (thus reducing their available capacity).

I don't think delegation necessarily has anything to do with seniority. Obviously as the delegator, you have to be in a position (whether that be by job title, role in the project, etc) be able to assign work to others, but that doesn't have to equate to you being their boss.

Hypothetically: If you are the lead on an SEO project that requires HTML, Content Creation and Apache Configuration inputs however you yourself only have a HTML skillset, then regardless of the seniority of the people in those other two teams in relation to you, you would delegate the related work to the skill sets in those teams. That may be someone more senior than yourself.

Delegation is the skill of understanding who has the right skill set of the task at hand, and handing that task over to them to complete within the restraints of the project.

As much as we all try, we can't be the best at absolutely everything :)

Totally hear that, Caleb Wetherell! The hardest part in delegating work is always finding someone to take it on :) What we do at Distilled is track our hours (part of the job of a consultant), which is necessary for client work anyway, but we share our bandwidth with one another too: that way, you can always show one of your team leads or colleagues that you're booked for the month and see if they actually have free time left aside that month.

Another "sales pitch" I might give a colleague is whether this project I need to assign is good for their growth and experience, not just in the company, but in general. For instance, if your strong suit is PPC, but you'd like to learn more about SEO, you might be more accommodating to take on an SEO project (or even trade, if they're working on something that fits within free time you have).

It's taken me a VERY long time to get the phrase "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself" out of my head. I realized that I was the common factor in all the projects I was asking for "help" on, and not getting the quality out of (read: *I* was the problem). That's why I'm such a big advocate of this debriefing model, as well as this check-in model. It allows you to be thorough, and ensure that people are doing the kind (read: quality) of work you expect and would like. Basically, what I'm trying to say is: remember that it takes two to mess up a delegated project!

Possibly the best comment right here. As a team grows, both numbers and skills-wise, at some point you have to get out of the way and let people take ownership. I really like the 1%-90% check-in points, which allows the "doer" to have some good level of ownership and the delegator an opportunity to coach and ensure it's on track. Great stuff!

Great article and a nice one also as we are embarking on 2017. I find that the SEO process is either new, in the making, or was done else where and now needs your agencies attention.

For me that will all depend on how and who to delegate to. Even if a team is small I think that having the right team member for the job is key. For example when working with just a team of three person 1 would be for the technical SEO, person 2 is for the on-page, and the last is to double check all the completed work. With that said though a person such as yourself is the biggest part of the puzzle which is the organizer of the project.

Having the right tools for the job always makes it better I am a GDrive person myself but will adapt when needed.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "the biggest part of the puzzle [which] is the organizer of the project," Tim. I mentioned this above, but what's important to recognize is that we (as delegators) aren't perfect, and are subject to being crappy at communicating what we want/need/expect from other people. What I do instead is have stopgaps like my briefing and percentage check in models to course correct poor communication on my and my delegatee's parts.

Sometimes we have to delegate our work and projects to others, but always without neglecting their professionalism.

Personally I think that if you are very busy and can not supply all your projects it is best to expand the workforce for these sector. So give one more job and this new person will be part of the team and among all the companies do the SEO and Web analytics required.

I see where you're coming from, Enrique--what I would say in response, however, is that managers/consultants/etc. aren't usually in a position to suggest or hire new employees! What I love about being able to delegate (and accept delegated projects from my colleagues) is that this system accounts for times of feast or famine: in any given month, I may have fewer client projects than my colleague might (even though we both are the primary consultants for the same number of clients), so this allows for me to make the most of times of "famine" (in workload or in client load) and help out my colleagues who may be experiencing a time of "feast," and need to take a project off their plate.

The check-in model is great! There were so many cases in my work experience, where the person you've delegated to didn't quite understand the task and was 80% through the job when I noticed that he or she was doing it all wrong. I don't intend to say that it was always the delegate's fault, at times I was the one who did not provide all the details. So yes, check-in at 5% and 30% is vital.

Although earlier I was not knowing about 'Trello' but now it has become one of my favorite tools. It's quite interesting to work. At a first glance, it looks me like a social networking site for my team, we can work on it simultaneously and no need to create a bunch of spreadsheets for our daily activity.

The part described in the "How to delegate effectively" ( brief, deadline, materials etc) is a must to read for those who give out the tasks! It seems so reasonable and obvious, yet often it's omitted and results in additional exchange of emails and waste of time of both participants.

But what's wrong with the maths here? 126% total? =) Or am I missing something?

1% (kickoff conversation);

5% (validation of process);

30% (ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time into the project);

Hey Ksenia_Emelyanova! Those percentages refer to points during the project's development WHEN you should check in with someone (so 1% would be right after you send an email with the brief, 5% would be once the delegatee has begun working on the project, but is still in the very early stages, etc.). Hope that clears things up!

30% is perfect for a check-in, because they should understand the nature of the rest of the project by that time. 50% is risky, and 20% is just too soon as they are likely still getting their heads around the project as whole and have not had time to solve many problems, and encounter or envision encountering real obstacles around the next corner. I'd probably want to check-in again at 75% to make sure any high-hanging fruit they've kicked down the road don't come back to threaten the delivery date, as the part of the puzzle they may be stuck could involve you having to go get someone else with a little bit of "fire drill", which no one appreciates :)

The article makes a valid point! Having project management skills is good. However, it pays to have experienced project management professionals for your SEO work. Delegation is a vital part of effective project management and offer future-proofing. This statement couldn’t be truer. Sometimes, delegating work offers a fresh perspective on the overall SEO strategy (e.g. What did I miss or how can I improve this process better?).

That's a great point, Patrick. There are so many other tangential benefits to delegating work, including seeing if another approach that your delegatee takes with your work is a better/more efficient way to get it done.

It is very important to delegate this task to the right person or company, because being in the wrong way can cause us to lose time, money and customers and therefore billing in our business. A web project can be very good but if we do not put emphasis and a great effort on the SEO as one of the main tools of attracting traffic will eventually sink.

Hi Zee, amazing post - really insightful. Interesting to look at SEO from a management/delegation perspective as previously, SEO in our agency has been carried out by one person, and it's something we're looking to move away from.

Little bit off topic actually, but when you or someone from your team carries out a Page Speed Audit, is this just investigating the results returned and making the changes suggested in a Page Speed report (on Moz or similar of course!) or do you have a more in-depth method? Speed in general is something that's plagued some of our sites due to the .NET Framework and its subsequent restrictions, and I wondered if there was some deeper level of a Page Speed Audit that you do that might help! Apologies again for off-topic comment, and superb article :)

It is off topic, but I have some articles that might be handy. TL;DR though, when I do a page speed audit, I use tools like webpagetest.org as a jumping off point to start identifying areas to focus on. If you're savvy with Chrome's DevTools (or want to learn), highly recommend going there to see what's loading, when, and for how long.

Zee great write up on delegating. I have found this to be one of the hardest practices in SEO and Website Design. I have found a few really good employees and I rely on them for a lot of different tasks. One of the biggest ways I have found to help when delegating and hiring is the ability for someone to follow instructions and pay attention to the details. Mistakes are going to happen, but when first recruiting a new contractor/employee we have found if they can perform the tasks needed, in a timely manner and very good accuracy, these people are keepers that we delegate tasks to. I also agree with you on using Drive. My team and I use drive for a lot of projects and client interactions as it has easy access to Word Docs and Excel Docs through the interface. Not all clients have these tools.

It can definitely be a pain when working with clients who use their own preferred/proprietary tools (and eschew whatever it is you normally use). I've got a number of clients who also don't like to use GDocs, but I'll still work within the GDoc environment, then export anything I need to share with them. I KIND OF like it to help with quality control (you can't share a document with someone too soon that way!), and otherwise being able to still use my preferred tools and ship things to clients in their preferred format has worked well!

Been using both Trello and Asana, I would like to recommend Teamwork.com, when you get more and more tasks to control. I am happy with the first mentioned, but the latter really solved a lot og problems for us, when we started to hire more people and work on different projects :-)

The 1%, 5%, 30% and 90% milestone checks and discussions are useful, especially for those who tend to micro-manage. I think you could add Slack to the list of Tools. It is quite useful to form teams and groups within a company and discuss closeout of work.

Definitely--we use Slack all the time at work, and it helps particularly if you don't have the time to check in in-person.

Micro-managing is definitely a potential pitfall of the model, however I find that even with people who don't like to be micro-managed, and those who DO micro-manage work better together when check in points are put in place at the beginning of a project. That way, the person who hates being micro-managed knows that there are definitive check in starts and stops (and can call out the micro-manager if they're checking in too frequently), and the one who micro-manages is restricted to designated times.

FrankViolette, in a past life, yes! Especially if you're working in-house/have a team of one, sometimes it's necessary to outsource. I usually employ the same Brief and % check in model when working with external agencies as well. Having this format to rely on still encompasses the work you need done, regardless of whether it's by someone on your team, or an external partner.

Hello Zee, thanks for the SEO blog. We are a company of SEO and digital marketing in Spain, we use inbox also and tools like basecampor because, as you said, you can use texts with images. I think that if you can not manage your projects you will not see the impact that otherwise you could achieve. Thanks for the blog and happy holidays!